Spanish youth has the reputation of staying at home for longer than any other of its European counterparts. It is not unusual for a young man to remain under his mother's tender loving care until getting married at around 33 - his sisters usually marry a few years earlier, at about 27 or 28.

If that is true, then 24-year-old Yolanda Lopez is bucking the trend. Her parents live in a small town some 75 kms outside Madrid, near Toledo, and when she came to the capital at 20 - at first to study and then to work - she was forced to find her own accommodation.

'I would prefer to sacrifice and have something to show for it in the end than pay out into some landlord's bank account,' she says. Yolanda, a dental nurse, is engaged to be married in October, and two years ago she and her 26-year-old fiance Raul scraped together the £8,000 down-payment on a 60square-metre, two-bedroom, 20year-old apartment in Getafe, a working-class suburb of Madrid, 15 kms from the centre. The flat is extremely noisy as theirs is a third-floor walk-up flat in a four-storey building near the Spanish airforce base, with low-flying aircraft landing and taking off just down the road.

Although both Yolanda and Raul are working, the bank demanded a guarantee from their parents before it would lend them the remaining £39,000. They have a 20-year mortgage. Their repayments are currently 83,000 pesetas (£332) a month. 'We would have had to pay at least twice that if we had bought a flat anywhere near the centre of Madrid or in a new building,' she says.

Raul, a jeweller's mechanic, is still living with his parents and Yolanda 'camps' in the one bedroom of the flat they have been able to furnish, mainly from family hand-me-downs. 'It is tiny and there isn't space for much furniture, but it is still virtually unfurnished,' she laughs. 'Our next big purchase will be the master bedroom. We will choose the furniture in April and hopefully will finish paying for it by the time we get married in October.'

The flat is so small, she says, that they will have no room for a dining table. 'We have a pull-down shelf in the kitchen with space for a couple of plates, but we hope one day to glass in the balcony and knock this into our sitting room.' They are fortunate in that Yolanda's father, Nicolas, is a builder and tiler and he has promised to carry out the construction work for just the cost of the material, and Raul's mother will make their curtains and window blinds for them.

The couple work very hard to pay off their loans. Raul works from 8 am to 8.30 pm, with Friday afternoons free. His salary is a basic £539 a month, with an average £100 in overtime pay. Yolanda's working week is even harder: an eight-hour day, Monday to Friday, as a dental nurse, and an 8 am to 3 pm day on Saturdays and Sundays in an old people's home on the other side of Madrid, which necessitates a 45-minute drive in the couple's 10-year-old car. Her combined salary from the two jobs is £720.

They plan to wait at least three years after they marry before starting a family.